BARCELONA—Taste is everything at HTC. While Samsung and LG dream big, HTC is doing the best job so far of delivering a smaller, more tasteful but still high-end Android phone.

The HTC One M9, announced today at Mobile World Congress, is a little smaller and cuter than last year's M8, and is a bit more of a fashion phone than its major Android competitors.

Superficially, the M8 and M9 look a lot alike. They're both all metal, with rounded corners and big BoomSound speakers above and below the screen. HTC moved the power button from the top to the side, and put a slightly strange "lip" around the edge of the phone. That doesn't make design sense until you hear that there's going to be a two-tone silver-and-gold model, and the lip marks the place where the color changes.

The M9 is just a few millimeters shorter and a teensy bit thicker than the M8, but not enough to matter. The 5-inch 1080p LCD screen is much brighter than the M8's, though, which is very easy to see when the phones are next to each other.

HTC ditched the "ultrapixel" main camera for a more conventional 20-megapixel unit with 4K video recording and a sapphire glass lens. I snapped some photos and videos, and the camera was extremely fast, but the video camera mode had serious autofocus problems. It couldn't lock in until I tapped on the screen to focus. (Prototypes are often like that.) Playing back my video, the BoomSound speakers were very loud and extremely rich. The ultrapixels, by the way, are now on the front; the 4-megapixel front-facing camera is just the M8's rear camera turned around.

There's still a MicroSD card slot on the side capable of holding 128GB cards, which supplement the standard 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM. The M9 uses Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 processor, which we tested on the LG G Flex 2. I ran a quick Sunspider Web benchmark on the M9 and got the same speed I saw on the G Flex 2 at CES, which was half the speed I saw on the production G Flex 2. Software optimization matters a lot, clearly.

Speaking of software, the new Sense 7, which goes with Android 5.0.1 "Lollipop," is a big part of the cute, cuddly experience here. When I got my demo unit, it had a theme on it which turned all of the app icons into little circles. There's another theme where, with one touch, you can turn everything into a cartoon-planets-and-stars theme, including the supposedly unchangeable standard Android action buttons.

There will be branded themes from the likes of Disney, as well as a theming option to go with your wardrobe: you can take a picture of yourself, and the phone will re-theme itself in colors that go with your outfit.

More on the productivity side, HTC has a new location-enabled home screen widget which will pop up relevant apps depending on whether you're at home, work or outdoors. For instance, you'd see productivity apps at work and entertainment apps at home. Eventually, the widget could tell what kind of a location you're in when you're out, HTC said; for instance, making train schedules appear when you're in a train station.

Horrible, Terrible Carriers The One M9 will appear on all four major U.S. carriers. But being U.S. carriers, they had to ruin it a bit.

HTC says the One M9 uses the latest Qualcomm modem, the one in the iPhone 6 and Nexus 6, which supports all the U.S. carriers. The modem can support up to 21 LTE bands, the company says. Combined with the new FCC rules requiring device unlocking, that might mean a phone you can easily move between carriers.

However, the U.S. carriers have requested four different versions of the M9, presumably to prevent you from moving the phone to another carrier:

The AT&T version has bands 2/3/4/5/7/12/13/17/29/30, so it can run on the AT&T network, the T-Mobile network, or with Canadian or foreign GSM/LTE networks. I'm going to assume that the GSM versions don't have an active CDMA radio, as well.

The Sprint version just has 2/5/12/25/26/41. That means it'll run very well on Sprint's or T-Mobile's networks if unlocked, but is at a disadvantage with AT&T or Verizon.

The T-Mobile version has 2/4/12/17. That's perfect for T-Mobile, and slightly less good for AT&T.

Verizon's version has 2/4/5/13. That's great for Verizon but not good for Sprint at all.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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